The 2014 Smithsonian compilation, Classic African American Songsters from Smithsonian Folkways, brings together recordings culled from the museum's vast collection that showcase the stylistic diversity of artists who, though largely known for playing the blues, performed many other genres of music. These are songs that move through such wide-ranging styles as ragtime, country, Tin Pan Alley, and more. Included are songs by Big Bill Broonzy, Lead Belly, Mississippi John Hurt, Peg Leg Sam, and many others.

Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people.